This project proposes to explore the relationship between socio-economic status, biological relationships and ethnicity and blood pressure levels in a Southern U.S. community. The social environments of community, kinship networks and households are the contexts of investigation. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that it is not ethnicity, biological relationships or socioeconomic status alone which gives rise to the onset of hypertension, but that the dynamic sociocultural processes that take place within significant social environments have to also be taken into consideration. This is held to be particularly true in regards to the fact that it is within such environments that behavioral and attitudinal risk factors of hypertension such as diet and patterned responses to stressors are developed and maintained. Intensive anthropological techniques such as participant observation, geneological reconstructions and personal histories which are new to the study of hypertension will be developed and used, as well as traditional interview techniques and anthropometric measurements. The data collection phase is divided into three stages. The first stage consists of the intensive ethnographic study of eight core househods: four black and four white. Two of the households in each racial (Ethnic) category are lower income, and two are middle income. In each color class category there is one household with at least one hypertensive adult, and one household free of hypertension. The second phase is an ethnography of the most significant part of the network of the core households. In the third stage, a standardized interview schedule will be developed from the data gleaned from the two ethnographic phases. This is a three year project.